


Say You're Sorry Now

by TheOtherMaddHatter



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: 100 Ways To Say, Apologies, Brother Feels, Brotherhood, Brotherly Love, Brothers, Gen, He Knows Something's Up, Loki Feels, Loki Needs a Hug, Memory Alteration, Memory Magic, They Go Badly, Thor Is Not Stupid, missing memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-24
Updated: 2013-09-24
Packaged: 2017-12-27 12:02:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/978619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOtherMaddHatter/pseuds/TheOtherMaddHatter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki has apologized to Thor so many times, that he can't keep tract any more.  Except he can.  He has to, because Thor, well Thor won't ever be able to remember any of them.  Not if Loki has his way.  And Loki?  Always has his way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Say You're Sorry Now

**Author's Note:**

> Written to kill my best friend Katie's feels, all of them. I'm pretty sure I succeeded.

Loki has apologized to Thor exactly forty-three times in the past four months, once every few days or so.  Sometimes twice in the same day.  Some days, not at all.  Each apology is more elaborate and heart-felt than the last, ranging from small gestures of compassion and love to huge extravagance designed to win Thor’s favor.  And with each successive turn, Loki tries harder and harder to tell Thor just how sorry he is for all that he’s done.  For all the pain he’s inflicted upon him.  Each time, he is successful in winning his brother back.  But Thor does not remember any of this.  Thor cannot remember any of these apologies, the gifts, the tokens, because Thor has been poisoned.  

 

The poison isn’t detrimental to his well-being, no.  In fact, it doesn’t to anything to Thor besides remove his memories during certain time frames, or in some cases, for the past day.  Loki wouldn’t allow something as simple and sneaky as poison kill his beloved golden brother.  Not someone like Thor.  He would never, could never, sentence Thor to an afterlife trapped outside of Valhalla for dying an unheroic death outside of battle.  He would never wish that on someone as glorious in battle as his brother was.  Thor was one of direct battle and conquest, not like Loki, who relied on Seidr and trickery to win his wars.  The poison’s job is to make sure that Thor could not remember any of the moments where Loki has said how truly sorry he was.  To erase the moments where he begged his brother for redemption after redemption.  Gave apology after apology until his throat was as sore as his heart.  

 

Instead, Loki makes his apology, his overtures, and then doses Thor with specially spelled flowers that Midgardians call Forget-Me-Nots, and a spell of his own design.  He names the spell after the desire to never be forgotten from the minds of others, and the Midgardians apparently followed suit with the flower.  It is an appropriate name if Loki has ever heard one, and he’s certain that the name is a remnant of a time when he and his kind walked the face of Midgard centuries ago.  Loki has been using the flowers in his memory spells for a very, very long time, after all.  It is easy to jump to that conclusion when all the facts point towards it readily.  Nevertheless, as soon as Thor has inhaled the powdered, cursed blooms, he falls into an enchanted slumber, and when he wakes the next day, he is always back in his bed at Stark Tower with no memory of the previous day’s cursed events.  Loki is always careful to leave Thor with important memories, so as not to raise suspicion, but those little ones?  The ones of him and his brother and the love that Loki still holds for his family when he approaches Thor with sorrow on his voice?  Those he removes as quickly as he can.  

 

It is for the best, Loki is sure.  

 

This is how it needs to be.  

 

Because despite all of Thor’s impossibilities and personal flaws, he would never give up on Loki, no matter what Loki has done to him.  He could stab him, flay him, put curse after humiliating curse upon him, and still Thor would take him back with open arms and warm smiles.  It is a quality that Thor has always possessed, and Loki has been envious of it for as long as he can remember.  Turns out, that the reason Loki was nothing like Thor was because he was not of the same blood.  It is one of many crippling blows dealt with the revelation of Loki’s true origin, and it is one that hits him the hardest.  Not that he was a fosterling monster lied to by the parents that he thought loved him, that he still loved... No, that despite all his efforts, all his attempts, he would never, could never be as good and as pure as Thor.  It cripples him in ways he still cannot combat.  

 

Loki misses Thor’s hugs more than anything, tough, especially in the dark portions of the night when he is alone in a foreign place, far from home.  He misses the casual contact he and his brother shared once upon a time.  And he misses the way that Thor’s eyes light up when Loki has played a truly marvelous trick or prank, because Thor always laughed in the end, even if the prank was at his expense.  He accepted Loki like no other, before or since.  It is one of the reasons that Loki takes Thor’s memories from him after every time he comes crawling back.  To save Thor and sacrifice himself.  

 

Thor asks him once, before Loki has built up the nerve to dose him this time around, if he has apologized before.  If this is not the first time they’ve gone through a happy reunion of brothers long parted.  If there is some reason that Thor cannot remember, but that he feels as if they have.  Loki’s small smile is wiped from his face quicker than he can banish things, and his heart freezes over like the cold wilderness of Jotunheim before he all but throws the petals into Thor’s face in his haste to cover his own tears.  It leaves a raw pain in its wake that not even Thor could hope to sooth.  

 

Now Thor doesn’t even remember asking such a foolish question in the first place.

 

He made sure to even take the impressions back this time.  

 

It leaves Loki alone with the burden of remembering each smile his brother gives him, each kind word of forgiveness, and each laugh of happiness.  And if it leaves him colder and colder each time he does it?  Well, then he has no one to blame but himself.  


End file.
